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| The LifeStory Institute The writer's workshop for memoirists, autobiographers and family historians. Founded in 1991 as a how-to newsletter/magazine, LifeStory, and also as an over-the-road workshop travelling North America teaching and coaching new and longtime writers of all ages how to write about their lives and the lives of their ancestors. The basic premise is that everyone can, and probably should, write their life story to pass on to their family, friends, and others interested, including and perhaps especially, historians. |
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Baked Fresh This Morning Thursday, January 12, 2012 Ah, always the children! It is cold and windy. It’s 62 inside here upstairs and I’ve got a small electric heater on. My feet and legs keep warm. I’m wearing a t-shirt, a heavy pullover shirt, and a sweater vest on top of it all. But I’m comfortable. It’s about 15 outside and there’s a fifteen mph wind out of the north. I hear the wind pulling at the house, slapping the branches of the walnuts against the roof. This is, after all, January. The low tonight is forecast to be 9. We had a bit of snow yesterday, a dusting of snow. It is 3 am and it’s pitch dark. I’ve been up just a half hour or so. Usually I try to sleep a little later but when I’m awake, I’m awake, there’s no going back to sleep. It’d just be tossing and turning until the red of the digital clock said 5, which is when I like to get up. I’ve been getting up in the middle of the night like this for years to write.
so boring now with all the election drivel, only rarely is an issue discussed in any depth, just soundbytes and surveys, Romney now at 22%, and like I care? They never ask how many of their viewers, what percentage, are standing half-dressed in their living rooms with a sledge-hammer, ready to smash the television flat. So in a short time I come up here. I’m drinking hot water in my coffee cup. It helps digestion and coffee seems to give me heartburn. One more thing to give up. And I so loved coffee. On the wall above my desk are some pictures of my children and grandchildren that sustain me. Two days ago it was quite warm and as I pulled up to the drive in mailbox next to Woodrow Wilson Grade School I rolled down my car window to drop the letters in and I saw all the children, hundreds of them, outside playing in the afternoon sun. Recess! I sat there for a minute until somebody came up behind me and tapped their horn and I listened to the voices of the kids, watched the swirl of them running to and fro twittering like a happy flight of birds. Sixty-four years ago in 1948 I was in that very school yard doing what they are doing now in 2012. And I know I am lucky--and blessed. Sometimes I’m not sure who did the blessing or why but I know I’ve got them, and I am grateful. January 11, 2012 Last night in the cold dark I walked up the hill to the mailbox to get the evening paper. It was cold but not windy. I was warmly dressed and comfortable. I had a little hand flashlight so I could see the path. But I know the path from long, long use. The truth is that even today after more than forty years here, like a child I sometimes fear that a giant beast--a coyotodon or something-- will jump out from behind a tree and gobble me up. The truth is that almost certainly a coyotodon would be more frightened of a grizzled old man than I of it. It has been years since I’ve walked at night in the actual woods, say through Middle Earth and up to the top of Letter Rock Hill through the tall cedar trees. Maybe I never did. The nice thing about old age is that you can remember yourself doing a lot of things that you never had the courage or wherewithal to do. January 10, 2012 Time Machine: going back in my journal thirty years... Mon., Jan. 18, 1982 -
ve had enough of that for several lifetimes. “I do wish I’d change,” I started to write. I guess that means somebody would change me. Why can’t I change myself? Of course I have, some. But not enough. I’m particularly dissatisfied with my butt-sitting, wheel-spinning, moody-broody ways. I’m a thoroughly seasoned middle-aged man. I’ve led anything but a sheltered life. I’m a veteran, figuratively as well as literally--I served 6 years in the navy and traveled all over the world. I’ve had dozens of jobs and several careers, several wives. I have six children, been a success, been a failure, three college degrees, a couple of languages besides my own English, I’ve been rich, I’ve been poor. I should know the score, right? Well, I don’t. I don’t even know what the game is. I haven’t the slightest idea of what life is all about, for me or anyone else. I know that life’s not easy, yet I’m haunted by the thought that it really is very easy, and I’ve just made it hard for myself. I know that what I need to do is relax, lean back and laugh, but I’m more serious than a 20 year old, I am laughably earnest, idealistic, dewy-eyed. What is this life? “It’s just what you make it,” I’m told, but aren’t some of the things that it’s made better than some others? Aren’t some lives exemplary? I want mine to be. (Adolescent, adolescent--if I live to be a hundred, perhaps I’ll grow up.) This could be depressing to read: to think at 44, a relatively advanced age at that, I knew so little of how to live! And here I am at nearly 74, thirty years older, and do I have much to show for that? Yes and no. Mostly yes, but maybe it just doesn't show. I guess I know I had to do all that stuff to get where I am today, and I feel pretty good about where I am today. I have God, family, friends, meaningful work...what else is there, really? Wednesday, December 28, 2011 My journal is now 7,500,000 words long, but it is the entries like this, little vignettes of our family, that make it all worthwhile.
Danny made me a little candle, and I put it on my desk. Benny found it and took it. “I think it’s mine,” he said. “Danny made it for me.” “He made it for me,” I said, “and I want you to put it back on my desk.” “No,” he said, “it’s mine and I’ll put it on my desk.” He ran into his room with the candle. In a moment he came back. “Daddy, I’ll give this to you. I’ll put it on your desk.” “Thank you,” I said. “You’re welcome,” he said. And he put it on my desk. I think there are hundreds of such entries. Looking back on my life I see that I have made many mistakes and I have many regrets. But keeping a journal, starting on Feb. 24, 1964, isn't one of them. Far from it. Though I started it as a literary exercise (Didn't Andre Gide keep a journal, didn't Steinbeck?), it eventually became the very center of my writing life. This morning, as I do now every single morning of the world, I added another 1,000 plus words to it. Sunday, December 11, 2011 In the beginning was the word. By 1944 I was a pretty good reader. In our country school we read Dick and Jane books but when I came home we’d spread out the Indianapolis Star and I’ d read Major Hoople and other comics aloud to Mom. Major Hoople was a fat, lazy ne’er-do-well who chomped on day-old cigars and left home early in the day to escape the purview of Martha, his even fatter wife, and went down to the Owls Club to smoke, play cards and blather. Late at night he’d come home and Martha would be waiting for him, rolling pin in hand ready to bop him one. "Egad, Martha!" he’d say. "Harrrummph! I was detained at the Club for an important meeting of the officers." Mom was a working class gal from the wrong side of the Indianapolis tracks— John Dillinger’s girlfriend and Hoagy Carmichael (the guy who wrote Smoke Gets In Your Eyes) were in her circle of friends, but she was an A student. In 1932 she’d been out of high school several years working at Swing Tag when she met my father, a resident in ophthalmology and otorhinolaryngology at the University of Indiana Hospital. They met at one of those Prohibition basement parties where the young doctors were invited not just for their good looks but especially for their ability to cage pure alcohol from the hospital to make bathtub gin. So they met there and some ancillary chemistry took place: next day he phoned her to tell her he had seen brown eyes in his coffee that morning, and a few months later they were married in front of a wicket by a clerk at the courthouse downtown. From 1942 on Dad was overseas. Mom taught me to read. She didn’t have a degree in anything, certainly not in Reading Science or Epistomology or anything like that. So she just did it in her own way. In one of the comic strips I ran across the word "enterprise." "What’s that mean?" I asked Mom. "Well," she said, taking a long drag on her Chesterfield, "that’s where you enter something and you get a prize." It made sense to me. So that Christmas 1944 I was eagerly awaiting gifts but mindful of the ominous lines from Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, a song I’d heard on the radio, I guess, because there wasn’t anywhere else to hear it, those lines, to wit: You’d better be good for goodness’ sake…you d better watch out…you’d better not pout…I’m telling you why….SC is coming to town. I believed in Santa. I lay awake nights contemplating him. I’d never seen him. They not only didn’t have Santa Clauses in stores then, where we lived in "the Old Holler," they didn’t even have stores. But I was a true believer, and, like all true believers, the more improbable the belief the firmer mine became. At dawn on Christmas morning, my brother and I tumbled out of bed to see what Santa had left for us. (My brother, four years older, might by then have been a skeptic.) Yet there was proof positive propped against the wall by the glittering tree, almost covered by the stacks of wrapped packages I’d been fingering for days, a glorious surprise: a blackboard. A blackboard! I couldn’t have imagined such a gift. A full choir of singing angels could not have stunned me more. And on this real slate blackboard was written these words: Merry Christmas to Charlie from Santa Claus. Egad! Harrrumph! I was thunderstruck. I really, really was. Not only had this mythical guy somehow gotten down our smoky, smelly chimney carrying this blackboard, probably two feet high and three feet wide, but he had taken the time to write that line specifically to me! A few years later, my father home from the war, and by then living here in Manhattan, I was a student at Eugene Field School, and we had our monthly visit from our science teacher. Another pupil and I had a fierce discussion going: Santa Claus, my friend maintained, did not exist. When the teacher sat down at his desk my hand went up: Say it isn’t so! I don’t remember the particular verbal gymnastics the poor man went through. He squirmed and lamely explained...and explained. And there it was in a handful of chalk dust: No Santa. No doubt he didn’t sleep well that night. I didn’t either. It was the end of something for me. I wasn’t just devastated. My world was obliterated. I staggered under the weight of this new and uncomfortable knowledge that was a kind of malign force. In place of the Santa who had given me the reality of words was some sad, sissified construct of metaphor and myth, all murk and mirrors. I seethed with the betrayal. In one swoop I had gone from someone who said Yes to someone who said No! And I didn't like it one bit.
There’s an old joke I read when I was a kid, “2,500 Jokes For All Occasions” by Bennett Cerf, published way back in the 50s or maybe even the 40s. Bennett Cerf was a respected editor at Random House and my folks had that book in their library. Anyway, this old joke was about a comedian’s convention. All the comedians there knew most of the jokes and rather than bothering to tell them, they just gave them numbers. So this one guy is a visitor at the National Comedian’s Convention and he sees this other guy stand up in front of the audience and say, 216. And everyone laughs. Yet another guy stands up and says, 734, and everyone laughs again. 832, laughter. 219, laughter. Then a fellow stands up and yells, 555, and everyone laughs again of course-- except one man in the audience who laughs and laughs really hard and can’t seem to stop. The visitor says to one of the comedians, "Why is that man laughing so hard?" And the comedian says, "Oh, I guess he’s never heard that one before." Hahahahaha. Okay, anyway, I told that joke to my children years ago and they laughed and picked up on it. Somewhere in there they began to say, when I’d start to tell a favorite story or joke they'd all heard, "Oh, yeah, Dad, that’s 113, or 673, or even 1198," and they’d look at one another and laugh. But they never really got around to actually assigning the stories numbers. Now I’m thinking I may do that for them. Yes, I'm thinking now, I’ll list all my favorite stories, some of them humorous, some of them maybe not. I'll just list all the stories I love to tell, and I'll tell them. And I’ll give each one an actual number, starting with 1, right on up to 1,000 or whatever. Yes, I think I’ll do that. Maybe this one will be no. 1. Monday, November 28, 2011 Why don’t I remember anything before I was 4 or 5? Is that normal? I don’t remember North Dakota where we lived until 1940 or '41 at all. I don’t remember living in Manhattan for a short time in ’42 (or even if we did), I don’ t remember Camp Barkley, Texas except for two brief snapshots in my head; I don’t remember as much as I might about Indiana or Wisconsin later on. I need to start digging in to the years 1938 to 1946. Eight years that I could recover if I put my shoulder to the wheel! Why? Why should I try to "recover" those years? Is this some kind of perverse game I'm playing? Is this really for the sake of history to pass on to my children--and the world--or is this some kind of attempt at immortality? I sometimes wonder. It may be that, of course, but it may also be like the mountain some people climb, "because it's there." So long as I can by writing and plunging it, "recover" memories of my life, I'm going to do it. How can an archaeologist, knowing antiquities exist beneath his feet, not dig? Saturday, November 26, 2011 Sat., Jan. 21, 1978 -
depressed while working. It is getting easier and easier for me to shake off a depression by doing some little job. I can hardly believe I wrote that way, way back there. I was pretty smart back then but too dumb to know it! And that’s a hell of a good line about depression being an affliction of the leisured person. Of course it’s not original…whole books have been written about depression being the affliction of the leisure class. It’s not, of course, that people who work, work, work don’t get depressed; they certainly do. But the person who has meaningful work (aha, there’s the rub!) is less likely to get depressed, or to have depression as a common or constant companion. (Ugh!) The most meaningful work and the easiest to find is get out there and help someone. And I think it’s probably important to help them at the simplest and most elemental level: give them a ride, help them carry in their groceries, shovel their walk, mow their lawn. Such work is meaningful if the recipient finds it helpful. Note to people like me (ugh!): it is not helpful to other people to tell said same other people how to live their lives. Like writing paragraphs like this and appending them to the good old www. So there! Yesterday was the anniversary of JFK’s assassination. I remember that day very well. I have written about it a number of times so I don’t want to do it again. But what I want to do is ask, and try to answer, why we fix those dates-- assassinations and other public tragedies--so firmly in our minds. I don’t suppose it’s a huge mystery the solving of which will illuminate much of anything, but it’s worth asking and answering, at least just this once Of course I remember the times of personal tragedies too even more. The day my grandfather shot himself (he was 80 and incurably ill and physically miserable), the day my father hung himself (in pretty much the same condition as my grandfather and exactly the same age), the day my mother died...and so on. So I guess the vivid memories of the “public” tragedies is really nothing more than a recognition of the importance of the public, communal sphere in our lives. Perhaps that is the one upside of public tragedy: it brings us together. In such a way the death of a father or mother brings the family together too. Maybe, then, it’s a comfort to the dying to know that their death will bring the people they love together. I would like to think that would be so when I die. But no hurry. For now I’ll adopt a wait and see attitude. That said, I wish to raise a glass to Jack Kennedy, a wonderful man who might have lived to do more wonderful things in life than he did in death, and the first President I ever voted for when I was a mere lad of 22 back in November of 1960. ### Tuesday, November 22, 2011
When I lived in Wisconsin years ago, a young man teaching at the University of Wisconsin in Stevens Point, my family and I rented an old farmhouse in an area called Dewey Marsh. There were only a few hard scrabble farms there that made money on the profits from a few milk cows, but mostly subsisted on their own large gardens, wild strawberries and apple trees, catching up finances every decade or so by logging off a back forty planted to jack pines that were gobbled up by the local paper mills. And then there was me. The neighbors were poor maybe, but they were kind, even to a greenhorn English professor. Like much of rural Wisconsin in those days or perhaps even now, there was a small bar/restaurant in the neighborhood, a room or two in the farmer’s house that he and his wife and family turned into a commercial venture, selling a few drinks to the locals and hunters and fishermen on their way to the North Woods. Now and then I’d go down there and have a beer or two with neighbors. Once several of the neighbors were talking about seeing bears. My eyes must have bulged. I don’t remember quaking with fear, but the prospect of venturing into the woods (thick and dark and often marshy) again (I had done it several times by then) and running into, face to face with a bear made me a little more than queasy. Really? I said. Bears? Around here? One of the old timers, Ben Zaleski, assured me that there were bears around there, and he had seen them many times. Don’t bother them and they won’t bother you, he added. They’ll usually just turn and run from you. And then he added, It’s an honor to see a bear. I always remember that. I lived there long enough to have that honor. One day on the way home from class a black bear scampered across the road in front of me. He didn’t look back, but just ran on through the marsh, probably terrified at this shiny blue thing (my 1969 Toyota) bearing (!) down on him. Now here in Deep Creek in Kansas for the last 40 years (almost to the day, as I came here mid-November 1971), I realize the honor bestowed upon me by rabbits, raccoons, opposums, badgers, foxes, coyotes, bobcats, deer, wild turkeys...all the little live things, but no bears. What is the fascination with the sight of animals? For we all love it, urban dweller and country people alike. I think now in my old age it is the deep natural world calling to us, beckoning reminders that actually we are one with them. We are not essentially farmers or teachers or journalists or nurses…we are animals just like them. Let's hope a piece of our soul is still wild, still able to celebrate being part of the natural wild world.
Camels that had cost me forty-five cents, half empty, and tossed it out the window into the street. Yes, I littered. But I never smoked again. I started smoking in my early teens. Both of my parents smoked. Most of the adults I knew smoked. On the back of Time and Life Magazine were big glossy photographs of celebrities and others smoking and smiling up at me. One common one was “Four out of five New York doctors smoke Camels.” And Old Gold cigarettes offered “a treat instead of a treatment,” a jibe at the new menthol cigarets that were supposed to “sooth your throat.” “Got a cold?” the little penguin asked. “Smoke Kools!” The only accusation offered against smoking was that it “stunted your growth.” But there were plenty of kids in high school, already over six feet tall, who were lighting up even as they left the school grounds. War movies showed pilots being shot down and rescued from a burning airplane and being offered a cigarette by helpful medics. College girls were taught how to smoke by their sorority sisters and, if they just couldn’t bring themselves to light up, they were advised to carry a pack anyway and to help their boyfriends light up. It was part of the culture. If you wanted to be “with it,” you smoked. Or so I thought. Plenty of people didn’t take up the habit. But in my own stunted emotional case I felt smoking would help me grow up. It was a sign of sophistication and, oh, I wanted that. I had a Ronson lighter for dress and a Zippo for everyday. I even for a time (I cringe to remember) carried a silvery cigarette case. When I married and my wife and I had friends over we made sure there were cigarets and a lighter--and of course ashtrays--out on the coffee table. Then the Surgeon General made his report to the nation. At first it was the subject of jokes: Q. Have you given up smoking, as the Surgeon General recommends? A. No, but I’ve given up reading. Hahahaha. Over the ensuing years, however, the evidence of the disease and death caused by smoking has grown. Now we are a nation of ex-smokers and those who want to quit. A few people who smoke do so defiantly insist that they love it and will do it all the rest of their lives--but, excuse my English, they are dying out. So I quit almost thirty years ago after smoking for almost thirty years. Two years ago, having more than a little trouble with the lingering effects of chronic bronchitis, I was diagnosed with COPD: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. There are genetic components to this onset, and emotional and stress components from some asthma going back to my childhood but the inescapable reality is that the main cause was my smoking. “I quit nearly thirty years ago!” I protested to my pulmonologist. “But the damage was done,” he said. “It’s irreversible.” So I live with it. I’ll die from it, not today or tomorrow but sooner than I wanted to. So be it. What’s done is done. Meantime, I can be a warning to others. If you don't smoke, don't start. If you do, quit. ### I always thought of God as sitting Indian style, cross-legged I guess you’d call it, on a cloud. He (definitely a He) was wearing a red and white stripped polo shirt. He had thick black wavy hair like my father and, what do you know, he resembled my father in the face, too.
remember my father, really, because he had been overseas in The War more since 1942. My father was the person who wrote the tiny V-mail letters to my mother that she would read aloud to us at supper. God was a fantasy and so was my father. But by the time I was 11, my father, back home and living with us, was well-known to me. God remained a fantasy. I didn’t think that, of course. I thought God was real. Still, I have to admit I was healthily skeptical. One cloudy Saturday morning I put Him to the test—and He failed. I was sitting in the bathtub thinking about Him. I muttered a prayer out loud. Dear God, I said, Please don’t let it rain today because I want to go outside and play. God did not answer. Then I thought, what is God going to do? For I knew that the day before Bryan, my friend who lived on a farm, had said he hoped it would rain the next day because he didn’t want to work putting up hay. Now if God answers your prayers, He’s credible. If He doesn’t, He’s not. That's simplistic thinking, maybe self-centered thinking—certainly it’s self-centered thinking—but it’s the way eleven year olds think. Or it was the way I thought at 11. It rained. God had not answered my prayer. Had God answered Bryan’s? Well, it had rained, as he wanted. Yet I frankly doubted that God made it rain in response to Bryan's prayer. How could He listen to every kids’ prayer about every little thing? So God went the way of Santa Claus: an improbable figure designed to keep kids under control. You better watch out! You better watch out! I’m telling you why: He knows what you’ve been thinking. He knows when you’ve been bad or good… Now I find myself amazed at how much press is still given to the subject of God and Religion. It all seems so utterly, utterly childish and irrelevant. Imagine the whole country going around wondering what Santa’s going to put under the tree for them this year. A new house? A new car? I have come to believe in God, however. I have come to believe that God is necessary so that I am reminded that I’m not responsible for the universe. God is for me just a voice in my head, the most persistent and reasonable of the many voices I have up there. I could call God Dog or Grog or Pollywog but I choose to call him God because that’s what most everybody else does and I need a little--I need a lot--of humility and knowing that I’m not all that different from everybody else. I am through being terminally unique. I’m just another human being and that’s what I need to know at age 73. That and the best way to worship (“find the worth of”) God is to be as helpful as I can to all God’s creation. Q. Did you hear about the dyslexic atheist? A. He didn't believe in Dog. Life is so very long and various, by the time we're old we seem to have lived so many different lives, that sometimes when I look back in my journal I wonder who wrote it. As, for example, this from
I finished planting the milo, except for part of one row, which has to be hand planted since the seed box was empty. I had many problems with the planter--so many that, if possible, I’d just like to scrap it, or sell it, & get a newer planter. The main problem was that one seeders seeds 3 or 4 times faster than the other, even though the plates are identical. There must be a leak--I’ll just have to jack the damn thing up & run it while I can watch it. Another problem was that the planter sometimes fails to catch & stay out of the ground, or it fails to drop & stay in the ground. I think the dog linkage is worn. Finally, the nose of one share is tipped down (probably it hit a rock) and tends to dig much deeper than the other. All of these problems can be corrected--a good day’s work--but I’d rather get a later model planter, something a little more maneuverable & hydraulically operated. This evening I planted buckwheat in the SE corner (Field #3). I broadcast it in--don’t know what kind of stand I’ll get--and then harrowed it. No sense putting milo there, since, when they come in August to terrace field #2, I think they’ll have to push some dirt from Field #3 to do the first terrace. With luck, the buckwheat will bloom by August, if not set on seed. I planted it mainly to keep the weeds down but also for forage. I took the sheep (5 ewes and 4 lambs) over to the McDowell Creek Farm feedlot. There are lots of weeds there and some grass. I hope they stay in--the fence is pretty good, but there are some places where it isn’t all that sheep- tight--or coyote tight, for that matter. But I guess that was me. The handwriting in the spiral notebook I used for journaling back then sure looks like it was mine. Sunday, November 6, 2011 Dad wanted me to do well. I was just sitting here, cursor blinking, ready to click on just about anything that came into my mind, and I got to thinking about how Dad was an athlete and a sportsman. He was a champion. I wasn’t much with sports, not even swimming, much as I loved it, or pool. I just wasn’t competitive. I didn’t want to win. I was afraid to win. Just now before coming up here I watched--it just happened to be on--for the umpteenth time that impossible Dodge City shooting contest scene from Winchester ’73. I reveled in watching it. But I wasn’t like that, and am not. I wasn't like Jimmy Steward or even Stephen McNally. I’m just not a competitor. I’m a cooperator, very much the opposite of my dad in that. Whenever I won at anything it always embarrassed me, and I felt so bad for the loser. Weird, but that's me. That movie has always been special to me because I remember going to it when it came out (1950, wasn't it?) with my folks. The theatre was crowded and we couldn’t all sit together--my brother, me, and Mom and Dad. Somehow I got to sit with Dad. He enjoyed the movie, and so did I, of course. But I know now how much I loved my father, admired him--maybe I loved him so much I didn’t dare compete with him. I knew I could never measure up to him, I knew that without trying. “But he wanted me to do well.” He probably wanted me to do “better” than him, just as I want my children to do well and to do better than I have. I want them to beat me seven ways to Sunday, as we used to say. The thought that Dad wanted me to do well just popped into my head this morning, and not for the first time. He was proud of me in my writing and teaching, and he wanted me to do well. He most certainly didn’t want me to fail.
Replaying my past, one glimpse at a time.
Commune, of which I was a founding member--this guy was from some hippie commune downstate that had turned itself into a commercial operation manufacturing candles in an old warehouse in industrial Chicago, Scott somebody was his name, a tall bearded guy with a big hooked nose, very biblical looking, and he’d say stuff like “Truly,” or “Verily,” when someone said something he emphatically agreed with. He did it without a trace of irony. We in MayDay smiled a bit at one another a bit, when he did, though we much admired his entrepreneurship. An hour later I remember suddenly--walking upstairs with my fresh cup of coffee and thinking about chainsaws for some reason--a moment from my past in 1974 when I was working dismantling a house to sell as lumber, and I was denailing 2x4s as I was talking to an old man who had happened by. One nail I couldn’t remove I simply pounded into the board. The old man said, “Why man, don’t do that! It could ruin someone’s saw blade.” I was chastised, embarrassed, but I removed the nail, and it was a lesson to me. Now if I just play this over in my own mind, I may teach myself something about my past, about letting go of the things I did wrong, for instance. But if I share it, these glimpses, then I contribute to the general fund of human knowledge. Nothing grandiose about that, it’s just a simple fact. We all have a chance to contribute. And we should to whatever degree we can…shouldn’ t we? Let the world decide what it's worth, whether to use it or lose it. Wednesday, November 2, 2011 Last night after a not-very-productive day, really, and a late nap I didn’t really need, I woke depressed. All people, certainly all old people, have this from time to time. Of course. But I have come to hate and dread this feeling, a physical weight lowered onto me as I lie there. I know, I grimly know, there is only one thing to do, and I know that I don’t want to do that one thing, which is just this: get up and start moving. For depression is a vampire that is its own punishment, and it feeds on itself alone. Lying there will make it worse. But that’s what I want to do. My will is temporarily sick. I have to go against my own will and physically, almost as if being lifted by unseen hands (God’s hands…? Of course!) get up and move productively around. I decide I'm willing, and I do it, hating every second. I put my socks on the floor by the bed, I carry them into the laundry and toss them into the washing machine. I see there on the drier a pile of clean napkins and tea towels. I fold them and take them to the kitchen. I still hate every movement of my body but the moving is, somehow, a little easier. I trudge to the kitchen, put dishes away, food we left out, newspapers on the floor in the living room, and by this time, I’m moving without much thought other than the mechanical ones like newspapers, read them, put them in this pile, fluff up the couch pillows, get that shoe on the floor and take it to the bedroom, and on and on until, finally, I’m humming, I’m going, and I’ m even on the fringe of being happy, and I thank God for this physical work that lifts me out of myself and my depression. Thursday, October 27, 2011 In the fall of 1964 I began my teaching career at the University of Kansas as an Assistant Instructor of English. I fell in love with the job immediately and, I persuaded myself, if I wasn't any good at it, at least I wasn't boring. Looking back forty-seven years later I think maybe it was that I wasn't bored but probably the students were. Here's what I wrote in my journal forty-seven years ago this morning, Oct. 27, 1964:
when I was thinking about teaching, I did not see myself preparing lectures, but giving them. I did not think teaching would be such hard work. I saw myself delivering brilliant lectures to spellbound students. I saw myself changing the world. Ladies and gentlemen, it has not been like that. Not at all. At first, particularly, and even now, at times, I give dull, discordant and disjointed lectures to students whose heads are drooping in siesta. Just keeping their attention has proved a problem. Professor Nelick, when he said that "the little old lady from Coffeeville--in tennis shoes---will keep you [the teacher] honest," I knew what he was talking about. It is the less sophisticated, less jaded, students who keep a teacher on his toes. They do not let things go by their boards. It's embarrassing sometimes, but it's healthy. They resist; sometimes actively, sometimes passively. They either argue with me, or sleep. And they raise the damnest questions. Yesterday, for example. We were discussing definitions. A student gave, as an example of evil, the act of killing. "All right," I said, "a fly comes into the room. I raise my hand and kill him. Have I committed evil?" "You have to the fly!" someone shouted, and the students laughed. "How do you know that?" I replied. "Evil is a human concept." "How about to someone raising flies? You've committed evil to them." "I don’t know of anyone raising flies," I answered smugly. "How about in the laboratory?" And so on. they keep me honest, keep me attempting to clarify my ideas both to them and to myself. Simply because I must. Well, that's where I was 47 years ago in the prime of my pompous youth. Where and what am I now, that in another 47 years (I'll only be 120) I'll be looking back and laughing--or cowering? Wednesday, October 26, 2011 This morning I am remembering some of my past in the Navy. As much as I remember about the Navy, you'd think I spent thirty years on active duty instead of three and a half. It looms large in my memory. Even stuff like this:
weekend. We are stationed at the Naval Air Training Base at Norman, Oklahoma, and all lived in Manhattan or around it, and so I’m driving my 1947 Chevy and we’re headed for home and we’re getting an early start by guzzling from a six-pack or two of beer while we’re traveling. And then in Yates Center I guess I was driving a little too fast and a red light came on behind me and I was being pulled over by a policeman. He was in civilian clothes but flashed a badge and I think he really was the sheriff. He was an old man, maybe in his 50s. (!) We quickly rolled our beer bottles under the car seats and I opened the window just a little while the man told me I was going a little fast. “I’ll have to take you to jail,” he said, “unless you want to pay the fine now.” “How much is the fine?” I asked. “Five dollars,” he said. We looked at one another and reached in our pockets. All we could come up with--together--was forty-five cents. I had that in the palm of my hand. "This is all we've got," I said. “I guess that’ll have to do,” he said irritably, and took the money and was gone. And we drove on to Manhattan, smelling beer all the way home because we’d spilled most of it on the floor of the car. If the "sheriff" had asked nicely we'd have given him a couple of bottles of beer. Saturday, October 22, 2011 Busy, busy, busy! I once heard first mother-in-law say, and I privately made fun of that sentiment for years.
poetry of John Milton, like me for instance. Too busy to look at GREAT ART, like moi, who had taken by then a few French courses and was trying hard to dream in French. Well, now I have a different perspective: the one of old age. It's a very interesting perspective, let me tell you. Probably what Virginia was doing that busy day when I heard her say that as she hurried around getting ready to leave the house in the morning was to help girls and young women in the Girl Scouts of America, in which she was an active professional. She was probably helping her daughter, and even me, in some way--thinking kind thoughts at the very least, perhaps planning a family get together; certainly she was thinking and doing things to help her husband. Bottom line, she was a helpful, thoughtful, encouraging human being. What more can we ask of anyone?
June. Moammar Khadafy had been killed and the folks in Libya were celebrating by shooting their guns in the air, many of them large caliber automatic weapons. As they shot off the guns they were dancing up and down. One guy was brandishing a shiny scimitar for the television cameras. “I wouldn’t want to be standing next to him,” I said. June was fixing herself some eggs and only half watching, but she murmured something about how Khadafy used to be a handsome young man. “That was when I compared him to you,” she said. “I remember,” I said. “You always said I looked like Moammar Khadafy with a smile.” We laughed. So many years ago. The Libyan kids--that’s all they were, really, kids in their 20s or even younger, teenagers--were still dancing and shooting and flashing Vs. “Those bullets have to come down somewhere,” I said again, shaking my head. So old Moammar died. I’ll bet his tailor is disappointed. Or tailors. He probably had a whole fleet of tailors with all the outfits he wore. Now they were running clips of him marching around in his various ridiculous outfits. “Look at that,” I said to June. “I couldn’t even carry all that salad dressing! And look at those epaulets!” I was in Tripoli a couple three times, years ago, back in the 50s, as it was a stop on our Med Run on board the Military Sea Transportation Service ship I was a crew member of. We always went ashore and drank all we could in the few hours liberty we had. Drinking was pretty much about all we did in any port, sailors that we were. In Tripoli, we usually ended up more or less intoxicated and riding back to the ship clinging desperately to the hump of a camel. Well, I was happy for the Libyans. They were probably very nice people, and very deserving of a free country. And I was very, very happy that our own Maximum Leader had seen fit to “lead from behind.” I'll bet he doesn’t even own a single epaulet.
will be inspired to do the same. They are not examples of good writing-- though I do hope they're readable--but just examples of what one person can do in a few minutes (fifteen minutes or less) of writing each day to tell about their life and the life of their family.
along the way. Maybe what I'm doing, and all of us who write stuff like this, will be in the future a kind of petroglyph along the road that people will travel. Or who knows, maybe "this weary unbright cinder" (as Thomas Wolfe cynically had it back in the 1930s) will not exist...but we will do what we can to keep it alive as long as we can, won't we? When she lay dying, my mother said that when she died she wanted the world to end. "Mo-om," I said in dismay. "What about us?" I don't remember what she replied to that, if anything, but for some years afterward I held the sentiment she expressed--and as I interpreted it-- against her, as an example of her self-centeredness. Well, no question that Mom was self-centered in some ways. But she certainly loved her children and grandchildren enormously. I think now she was just saying she loved us and all the world so much that she hated to miss any of it. She thought about all of us continually. And I am here today to say that I am greatful for what she did for all of us. If it didn't frost last night (I haven't been out yet and it's still dark) it's going to tonight. Winter is coming, no two ways about it. And as for the frost, it's right on schedule: our average frost date here for northeastern Kansas at the western edge of the central hardwood region is October 20. And so tomorrow is...October 20.
living room. We have several little portable electric heaters in the bathroom and around. I have one by my footsies this morning, running, even as I'm sitting here writing. With the coffee and still in my favorite old red plaid bathrobe, it is all so cozy and toasty. I'm a happy man. I have some firewood cut but not much. I've been here forty years next month and I always wanted to be the kind of countryman who had eight or ten cords of firewood cut and stacked but that has never happened. I guess I've deprived myself of that luxury of security. Instead I have trudged through snow up to my waist and down into the bed of a frozen pond or creek to cut up and carry, sweating in my longies and chore suit, good oak or redelm firewood one chunk at a time. One year when I lived near Lawrence--this almost fifty years ago--I actually cut up the furniture I'd built out of logs and burned it for heat. And so I have to report that some people never learn. Tuesday, October 18, 2011 Believe it or not there is an Occupy MHK (the airport designation for “Manhattan, Kansas”) and they did a two or three hour stint in Triangle Park in Aggieville (the student business district near the KSU campus) on Saturday. We weren’t there--we had guests for a dinner that we’d planned before we knew about the “protest,”) but the local paper and television were. I think the protest was pretty tepid, just kind of a street party, but it was there, and they have a presence on Facebook, and all that.
Wisconsin, where where my wife and I lived and taught at UW-SP, but we went down to Madison to take part in some big demonstrations there. In the late summer of 1967 we went as alternate Wisconsin delegates to the National Convention for a New Politics, meeting in Chicago. It lasted several days, maybe a week, and was just like an old fashioned political party convention except that the delegates were all naifs like us with little or no political experience and high ideals. It was an interesting week. One thing stands out in my memory. As good liberals we were anxious to do something to help Blacks. That’s the way we looked at it then: help the Blacks. Maybe we even talked about Helping the Negro, I don’t remember. A black man stood up and gave us a talking to, and suggested that the best thing we could do to “help the Blacks” was to go back home to our lily white communities and start “white civilizing committees” (his term) and learn how to get along with people of other races. We listened quietly and rather coldly in disbelief. Here we were willing and able to do good and…our do-gooding was going unappreciated and thrown back at us. Of course over the years we all understood that the guy was absolutely right, and in a way, we did establish those committees, and eventually made ourselves into a diverse people who could more or less get along. So we muddled through, as the Brits say. And so we shall again.
As I've been crowing about now for weeks, I send an email to one of my six children every day Monday through Saturday. I start on Monday with the oldest, then work my way down to my youngest on Saturday. Each letter is a personal letter to them but also in nearly every letter I throw in some family history, often with a photograph from my family archives, which I maintain here at Letter Rock Park, where we live. ("Maintain" = store in boxes.)
similarly old and wanting to pass on their legacy, to get it piecemeal into the hands and minds of their progeny. Piecemeal is better than no meal at all, or the likely prospect of dying, in effect, intestate, with the legacy still in boxes at the homeplace all in a jumble. Today I sent an email to my oldest son, and this photo along with some comment was included: The picture attached is of some of your Kempthorne ancestors, probably taken about 1937. I date it that way because your great-grandfather, G. R., as he was called (for "Guy Rudolf Kempthorne), standing on the far right, is holding your uncle, my brother Kuhrman, who appears to be about 3 or 4. (Hal was born in August, 1934.) Jerry Kempthorne is standing in front and looks to be about 6 or 7. (He was born in September, 1930.) No doubt this picture was taken on a Sunday after dinner in somebody's front yard in Rewey, Wisconsin, our ancestral village in beautiful and verdant southwestern Wisconsin. I lived there as a boy for awhile and always loved this little town of 200-300 people.) And then I include a little news from my own life, We went to church yesterday and came home and took a nap. I really didn't do much all day. Early in the morning I got up (we had guests for dinner last night, and June made a wonderful black bean soup and cornbread--Ben and Melissa were coming too but at the last minute they couldn't) and I had my coffee and sat in the living room for a while... Today, this morning, probably just like you, I'm getting in my car and driving a few miles. I'm going to a town called Osage City, south of Topeka, to meet with several librarians in that area to talk about doing a workshop or two down there. I'll probably be back early afternoon. By then it may be raining, which is fine. We always need moisture here, and we've had a week or more of beautiful fall weather. I'll bet your woods are really getting pretty colorful, aren't they? [This son and his family live in Pennsylvania.] Ours are pretty good but mainly yellows and browns. We just don't have the maples and therefore the brilliant crimson colors that you have. And of course you have much, much thicker woods there. Love to you all, Dad And then I click on send and go have a second cup of coffee.
left the ship at night as soon as they gave us a gangway, and we threw some money at a cabby and told him to take us, probably six of us stuffed into the little car, somewhere exciting, the nightlife--the Casbah! And he took off, driving at top speed, dousing his lights except for intersections (I never did figure that out, why they’d do that, was it out of respect for light pollution and people’s privacy, or was it out of some mistaken belief that they saved electricity that way?), the streets so narrow, people sitting in doorways nearly being run over, and we passed through a business area, and there was, great god, a Sears Roebuck Store, a big white tile front, the sign in English and in Arabic; and then we roared, mufflerless, through the dark alleyways and came to a place that had a single light, if that, and we went in, opened the narrow door, and there in the great splash of light of the boite de nuit was our ship's Chaplain, Chaplain Doverspike, sitting on a pile of red pillows smoking a big cigar as a bellydancer writhed and danced on the no-doubt magic carpet in front of him.
one of my six adult children every weekday Monday through Saturday, the oldest on Mondays, next oldest on Tuesday, and so on till Saturday when I email the youngest, a mere lad of 32),
Navy, married to Betsy of course (we married in '57) and living in Manhattan and attending K-State, we thought about going to some other school, one a little more interesting, after Betsy graduated in January. About this same time the Cuban Revolution was in full swing and that was in all the news and all kinds of new stuff was in the air. The 50s had been a time of "complacency" --the word used then to describe the time--and now, change was definitely out there on the horizon. I identified with it, I had been in the Navy and more or less politically and personally on hold, I felt, and now I was a restless native. Betsy was cool with it, she was ready to make a move too. So I applied at two places, the University of Wisconsin and the University of California. Both were great state universities. I don't think I even thought about Harvard or some such place. I wanted to go to a big state university, that's where all the ferment was. Madison and Berkeley were the most political campuses in America. I was accepted at both places. Tuition then, was (unbelievably) virtually free at Berkeley, and at Madison it was something like $250 a semester. Assuming Betsy could get a job, and that too was an absolutely warranted assumption--there were plenty of jobs for teachers, and she was an elementary school teacher--we would have no trouble paying our own way. But as it turned out the rents for apartments were high in Berkeley. $250 a month for a one-bedroom apartment just across the street from the campus at Berkeley! That was high. So, that, and the fact that all my family had gone to Madison (Dad, of course, MD, 1932, and many cousins and uncles, about twenty of them in all), that I loved the state of Wisconsin and regarded it as my ancestral home--Dad was born in Platteville, Wisconsin, and we had lived nearby in the village of Rewey for a time during World War II--all that decided it for us and we moved to Madison. I've often thought what it would have been like had we gone to Berkeley. The Free Speech Movement was just starting out there, the weather was great, of course--mountains of snow in Wisconsin, of course, when we went there in late January of 1960, snow, snow, snow everywhere--and the whole post-war California culture and boom era was in full swing. Now, two thoughts come to me about this. One, that I'm writing an autobiography and handing it out a piece at a time to my children. I'm sharing my life...or maybe I'm shedding it. Or both. I think I've discovered that this is the most natural and immediate way to publish my life story and get it into the hands of the most important (if only) readers I can ever have, and to get it read. They will read a piece at a time; a book (if I ever finished it and printed it) they'd likely put aside intending to read it and not read it for years, or never read it, really. This way they get the history now, and can put it to use in their own lives right away. The other thought is less important, the thought about how when you get old you think how you might have done this, you might have done that, etc. It's a meaningless game, isn't it? Mildly amusing and of zero consequence or use. We did what we did and we are what we are. I can't see the usefulness of speculation. Or am I missing something here? Monday October 10, 2011
be having a heart attack. It was a steady burning strong pain in my upper center chest. It could have been a heart attack, and maybe considering the way I’d eaten the night before, it should have been one. But I took a couple of Omeprazoles, walked around for awhile, sat up and even watched tv a little, and then went back to bed somewhat more comfortably.
of course there was food as well as fellowship. I could have opted just for the fellowship and drunk some water or iced tea or coffee and talked and talked. But everyone else was eating, why shouldn’t I? So I ate…and ate. I ate a slice of roast beef with BBQ sauce, and I haven’t had any meat in months. I ate scalloped potatoes (two helpings), baked beans, a small slice of bread to mop it all up. “Shall we have a cookie?” June said, and so I ate a cookie, and then another, and another, and another…and maybe even one more past that. There were some little red capsule shaped candies in a dish beside the cookie plate. “Those are hot tamales,” someone said. So I ate ten or twenty of them. They were hot. “They’re not quite red hots,” I said, popping a couple more into my mouth. “Red hots are hard. These are soft on the outside.” Reflecting on this, I ate another half dozen or so. And then on the way home June wanted some candy. Orange slices, that’s what she wanted. So I pulled up beside K-Mart, still open though it was nearly 9 o’clock. “Do you want orange slices too?” she asked. “I hate orange slices,” I said, which of course she knew, even though I eat them when she gets them. “Do you want anything?” “Get me something,” I said. “Surprise me.” She came back with her orange slices, of course, and with a bag of jelly beans that I ate two at a time all the way home. I put the bag on the console as we parked. “Do you want these inside?” June said. “Yeesss!” I said, exasperated with myself. So inside I poured a glass of milk and ate more jelly beans until I saw that the entire sack--900 calories--was more than half gone. By this time I hated myself beyond all measure. I went to bed. About 4 I woke up with my heartburn. Considering what I ate it’s a wonder that I woke up at all. Saturday, October 8, 2011
but now looking at the hard earth and brown grass and empty or nearly empty ponds here at Letter Rock Park, I'm encouraged. I definitely want rain. I hope we get just a few inches of the ten inches predicted for Texas and Oklahoma, two states which have had drought all summer long.
had a drought, and never had a flood. It rained one inch every Thursday in season, and in the winter of course we had puh-lenty of snow. In some wierd way I feel that not getting enough rain is a reflection of God's disdain for me. And of course if we do get enough (do we ever get enough?), then God must love me. I think most people would call that a bit self-centered, wouldn't you? Well, I'm a work in progress (sometimes I think regress), and I'm only 73. Thursday, October 6, 2011 When Bill Clinton was campaigning for re-election, he put a sign up on his wall that said, It’s the economy, stupid. Maybe Barrack Obama ought to put one up saying, Hey, it’s not the stupid economy.
the concern. Maybe what is needed is a little benign neglect. Yes, let the bankers and business interests work it out--they’ll find a way, and if we don’t have to make deals about the deficit with them, they can just continue to pay through the nose (as they see it, the poor things, some of them with only a few million or even a few hundred thousand a year left over after they’ve paid their taxes and business expenses) while the rest of us contemplate what’s really important in life. Money, is not, after all, what’s really important in life. I have less of it than ever and, sure, at some point, we’re going to be in trouble. But isn’t that just like life? It all ends with a bang, or a whimper. Meantime, live a life, lean back in the arms of your beloved, for--as e. e. cummings noted years ago, "life's not a paragraph, and death is no parenthesis." October 5, 2011 Why do we remember this, and not that? Yesterday riding home in June’s car as she was driving we passed the lane leading into a house up on top the hill where, at least twenty-five years ago, we did a small job of repainting the walls on a stairway. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about the job, but here, after twenty-five years, I was remembering the look of the drops cloths on the stairs, the lady who engaged us, the lane leading up to the house on the hill, no trees around it (not even that was unremarkable), and I’m sure if I stopped and made notes I could have remembered much more. But instead I wondered why I remembered anything of that, and not of something else? What makes us remember things and forget others? Of course the fact of repression does a lot in the case of memories that have emotional content, just as something like its opposite keeps pleasant memories alive. But what about seemingly meaningless and neutral memories like this one? Why do we remember this, and not that? I honestly do not know. I suppose I have to take the memories one and one and, when it’s important, try to understand why I am being “sent” this memory or that one by my mind. Or God, if you want to think, as I do, that God is inside my brain.
meals a day and I’m not going to snack. Well, except…except the occasional banana, pear off our tree, or piece of hard candy to suck on as I drive to town. Yes, I so swear! I raise my right hand and promise! I am sooo sick of eating out of bags and bottles and sacks and cans. I'm sick to death of grazing. I'm sooo sick of eating bits of this and that. Only real meals from this moment on! Yes! And so what’s for breakfast? October 3, 2011
is a downside to keeping a journal, and that is that you have all too at hand the opportunity to see the way you were in the past. I take this to be an advantage in life, though often, painful--even horrifying. Here's something I find a bit painful if not horrifying from my journal the year I first started it, in 1964, which also happened to be the first year I taught. I taught Freshman English at the University of Kansas. And here's what I wrote: Teaching has not been much like I expected it to be. It is no surprise that, when I was thinking about teaching, I did not see myself preparing lectures, but giving them. I did not think teaching would be such hard work. I saw myself delivering brilliant lectures to spellbound students. I saw myself changing the world. Ladies and gentlemen, it has not been like that. Not at all. At first, particularly, and even now, at times, I give dull, discordant and disjointed lectures to students whose heads are drooping in siesta. Just keeping their attention has proved a problem. Professor Nelick, when he said that "the little old lady from Coffeeville--in tennis shoes---will keep you honest," knew what he was talking about. It is the less sophisticated, less jaded, students who keep a teacher on his toes. They do not let things go by their boards. It's embarrassing sometimes, but it's healthy. They resist; sometimes actively, sometimes passively. They either argue with me, or sleep. And they raise the damnest questions. Yesterday, for example. We were discussing definitions. A student gave, as an example of evil, the act of killing. "All right," I said, "a fly comes into the room. I raise my hand and kill him. Have I committed evil?" "You have to the fly!" someone shouted, and the students laughed. "How do you know that?" I replied. "Evil is a human concept." "How about to someone raising flies? You've committed evil to them." "I don’t know of anyone raising flies," I answered smugly. "How about in the laboratory?" And so on. they keep me honest, keep me attempting to clarify my ideas both to them and to myself. Simply because I must. Actually I'm kind of proud that after a month of teaching I had figured out that I wasn't going to be able to pompous my way through teaching freshmen, who weren't exactly little old ladies from Coffeyville (KS) but mostly 18-year- old young men and women from Kansas, fresh-faced, happy to be there and eager for the bell to ring. But it's horrifying that I continued to try to-- pompous my way, I mean--and do so, often, even today. Maybe even as I write, right now. Just lately I've been hearing some stuff from my fellow old folks about handwriting. They are handwringing over the fact that handwriting seems to have become, among our descendants, handprinting. Apparently a lot of schools have dropped the teaching of cursive writing in the schools. Of course now everyone uses a computer and texting and all that. Occasionally notes are from hand with a pen or pencil but among the young they are printed rather than writes cursively.
I don't handwrite much anymore. I do write little notes to myself to take to the computer later, occasionally I'll write a card of condolence or greeting, I do the grocery list in hand writing. That's about it. If I'm stuck without my laptop I'll handwrite several pages as in a class with others writing, something like that. But I'd rather keyboard. Still I love the look of my handwriting. I worked a long time on it, starting about 1942 making big round letters with a no. 2 pencil and learning to sign my name. (One young man told me that the only time he writes cursive is when he signs his name, and he seemed rather proud of that.) In some way our name is us, and so if we sign our name, that's who we are. A typed name just doesn't get it: it has no uniqueness, anyone could be it. I sign my name on checks (when I use them, books (when I sell them), and when I'm given a traffic ticket or some other legal document. So. I'll just repeat the adage, "the more things change, the more they stay the same," and move on. For now. September 28, 2011
nice. Dan is eating an orange, Rip is following him around. Kids always eat standing up. Leslie is playing with a whistle. Ben has just come downstairs. He wants a peanut butter sandwich. I deny him. He leaves the kitchen in tears, but now--less than a minute later, he is quietly talking with the others about something else. Leslie is singing, “Oh, my darling, Clementine.” June is shuffling around in the utility room--she has just come in from feeding the sheep. Rip rushes to greet her. Outside it is sunny, or partly sunny, or partly cloudy, not too cold for January 1st, but windy, and that makes it feel cold. It is cold. I went out early and did a little work on the chicken house. After Mom and Dad got here, I went out for awhile and loaded Dad’s car trunk full of kindling. June is changing Rip’s diaper. He screeches a little. Leslie is playing with Rip’s little hammer and bench--those things where you drive the pegs into holes. Dan has gone back upstairs and is playing something on Leslie’s tape recorder. Mom and Dad had breakfast with us. Waffles and mutton sausage. After breakfast we sat and watched a parade on TV--they seemed to want to. We talked a little. Dad laughed a couple of times--I love to see him laugh. I told the story that Bill Peck told me about his boyhood: he had 3 older brothers. Out for a Sunday drive, he remembers his father, one hand on the steering wheel, the other reaching over into the back seat where the 4 boys were, lashing away with his belt. Dad laughed at that. Is not the memory, aided by writing, a marvellous thing? My son Daniel lives in Alameda, California, is 42, has a partner, Liana, and two children, he is a songwriter and musician; Leslie, 39, is a medical researcher in brain traumas at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle, one child and a partner, Steve; Ben, 36, a painting contractor, lives here in Manhattan with his partner, Melissa, and her two sons; Rip, now 32, a union loneshoreman, lives in Tacoma, Washington with his wife, Joanne. Dad passed two years after this was written, Mom lived another fifteen years. Both lie in their graves a mile from here in the Pleasant Valley Cemetery. June and I live on right here in the same house, old people now ourselves. Memory is wonderful, and so also is Imagination: a hundred years from now in 2111, right here in this same place or on a Space Platform called Bright Star Community, by the grace of God a descendant of ours on a cold winter morning will read these lines...and smile broadly.
When I was 14, the year was 1952. I had been working for some months for Glenn and Elsie Graham in their print shop--starting the previous October, 1951, when I was just 13. But that summer Glenn didn't have enough work for me so I took a job as a dishwasher in a lower part of downtown Manhattan in a café called Earl’s Café.
an hour, noon to 8 pm every day (I’m sure I must have had one day off, probably a weekday), washing dishes. A “pearl diver,” as they were laughingly called back then. The kitchen was a large high-ceilinged room with grills, ovens, steam tables, a place for peeling potatoes and other kinds of vegetable preparation, and huge skylights overhead. At the very back by the doors there was a simple table with four chairs where Negroes could be served. You could look up and see light through the skylights, but I think they were of coated glass, so you couldn’t see the sky. There were fans to take the cooking odors away, the smoke, maybe even some of the heat. Along the east wall was the dishwashing set up: the huge gleaming stainless steel racks where we put the dirty dishes, and a couple of deep sinks and--I think but do not clearly remember--some kind of a steam washing thing where the dishes were put after they’d been basically washed in the water. That’s where I spent most of my time: standing in front of those deep sinks washing dishes just as I had for Mom for so many years. I didn’t mind the work at all. The waitresses and the cook were good to me. The boss, Earl, and his wife-- Nadine, I think--ran the place pretty handily. Earl was stern and demanding but not unfair. The only thing about the job that seemed onerous was clean-up after we closed. I was paid for eight hours, $4 per shift, noon to 8 pm. But then clean-up I had to do free. And it was pretty difficult--greasy skillets and pans and all the grids and grills and steam table, the whole kitchen, and this took an hour, always, and sometimes two. That was just part of the job, really making a ten hour day, and 40 cents an hour. Which wasn’t a lot, not even in 1952. September 24, 2011 If you're like me your childhood exists in your memory as if it were just a few scenes from a certain time and a certain place: for me it's a pleasant time of riding my bike, swimming in the old swimming hole, going to Saturday matinees at the State Theater, and always playing, playing, playing--workup baseball, hide and seek, swimming games, games played at picnics or inside at Thanksgiving, games like Simon Says or Charades.
the scenes from your childhood, the situation gets much more interesting, and much more complicated. And maybe not always so blissful. In my tote bag of memories I have scenes of my grandfather's suicide when I was in the next room, of being beaten up on the playground or just pushed around, of getting in trouble with Mom or Dad and being yelled at or punished, occasionally even physically. Oh, my. But on balance my childhood was pretty good, idyllic even, my parents loving and caring, my teachers at school more or less competent and some very good. We weren't poor, and I guess that's good-- though I sometimes seriously wonder. We lived in small towns or on farms, and that's good, but I suppose if I had grown up in New York City I would have found that good too. What I'm getting at, I think, is that for all my whining about my troubles today, if they can be traced to my childhood--and some can, I think--they were of my doing, and no one else's. Though for some years I thought so, I was not a victim. And I'm grateful to be here this morning. September 22, 2011 Is the unexamined life not worth living? That’s what old Plato said. I don’t remember the context. I think maybe he put it in the mouth of Socrates in one of the Dialogues. I wasn’t there; I’m not sure. But somebody said it, and it stuck. The unexamined life is not worth living. Ooops-- sorreee! Because I think maybe it’s the examined life that isn’t worth living, or rather, can’t be lived because you’re just too busy examining it. I mean, look at that word, “examination.” Does it conjure up any pleasant memories? As in “Final Examination,” or “the doctor will examine you now,” or “on examination you have been found…” I didn’t think so. I prefer life to examination. I trust my body to know what my mind needs to. Yes, truth to tell, I’d rather be a pig satisfied than a Socrates dissatisfied. September 21, 2011 This morning for what particular reason I do not know, this memory comes to me:
and next year we’d be going to Junior High. Class was starting and I was late. Mr. Garrett said, “Charles, take your seat.” And then he turned to the class. “What’s the capital of New Jersey?” Few among our august group knew the capital of New Jersey or even that there was a New Jersey, and if we did, we wondered why a state would be named for a cow, and a "new" one at that. But I, I knew. “Trenton!” I burst out, and Mr. Garrett, a balding man in his 40s with rimless spectacles, looked severely at me. “Charles! You’re not to speak unless you’re called on!” But I was right. Perhaps I knew more than John Brewster and Don Mason. I knew the capitals of all the states, it was just the sort of nonsensical and useless information that I trafficked in, the capital of Georgia, the population of San Francisco, the license plate numbers of friends’ parents’ cars… But I knew so little of use, and I was always the last boy chosen when we played baseball.
our parlor listening to Terry and the Pirates. Dragon Lady was talking to Captain --- (?) when the announcer interrupted. “We interrupt this program for an announcement by the President of the United States,” he said, and then there was some static and then I heard President Truman’s voice….”it will be necessary to send American troops to the Republic of Korea.” Or something like that. That’s the import of what I remember.
“Mom.” She stopped working and looked at me. “What is it, Butch?” She laughed. “Why do you say everything twice?” “Because,” I said, and then, “Because.” We laughed. “There’s a war in Korea,” I said. “What?” “Where is Korea?” I said. “Oh, it’s over there--she gestured with her potato peeler as if it were just east of our place here in Kansas-- over there with China and all those countries. All that is reconstructed, too. I’m not sure this is exactly what happened that day--I am sure about hearing it over the radio at a time when I was listening to, I’m pretty sure, Terry and the Pirates. But if I don’t reconstruct my past, which in some small way is our collective past, then who will? We live supposing a certain past whether we know it or not in our minds. Why not give it what reality we can? September 19, 2011 James tapped on the door about 2:30. We were lying down in the bedroom. I was half asleep and June was reading. I opened the door and there he was, the good young James, our savior in so many things here at Letter Rock: James, fixer of fences, repairer of mowers, framer of walls and, today--butcher of roosters three.
young "hens" to crow however croakily, we knew these hens weren’t hens. The little red combs got bigger and their crows got louder and stronger all too soon they were pursuing the hens everywhere, eating more than their share, standing us down when we came near them, the very epitome of male uselessness. The oldest one, Brian, a huge Buff Orpington, had spurs the length of your little finger, and very sharp. We were not about to butcher a chicken. A, we’re vegetarians, and B, probably one of the reasons we became vegetarians was because we didn’t like the idea of butchering anything, much less things that had feathers that had to be plucked. Ever try to give away a live rooster? Easier to give away a smouldering bomb. At length James was called (why didn’t we just call him first?) and he said sure, but he couldn’t do it for a few days. And here he was, Sunday afternoon, and ready to go to work. And so he did. I loaned him a pair of old leather gloves, helped him corner Brian first, he grabbed him, held him by the head and turned him around and around like a wind-up toy until, voila, his head came off. June put some hot water on to boil and James quickly wound the two other roosters--a pair of Barred Rocks--and had all three ready to dip and de-feather. We sat behind the machine shed and had a cup of coffee while we waited for the water. I asked him about his summer internship out in Colorado, about his classes now--he’s a last-semester senior at K-State in building science. James is a pleasant, good looking, short brown-haired young man of nearly 24, affable, sincere, utterly honest, hard-working and immensely competent. Once or twice he has come out with his girl friend/fiancée, Sarah, a pretty grey-eyed blond, so we’ve met her, too, and so I asked him about Sarah’s summer. “She was in Wichita,” he explained. We were sitting on improvised seats--an upturned five gallon bucket for him and an old plastic pop cooler for me--as we talked. Sarah was a dietetics major, doing something in a hospital/care home down there. Now she’s back in school, like him, “paying to go to school but working free as an intern” at a hospital (if I recall) here. I think their plan is to marry after she graduates in a year or so. They are a wonderful couple and we have been very lucky to have him for a couple of years as part time help out here. The biggest thing he did was engineer and carry out the re-roofing of our house. We (well, he, really: I’m too old to do such heavy lifting) got the huge pot of boiling water and for the next hour or so James dipped the roosters and plucked them clean. I worked in the shop on a chain saw for awhile and wandered around, occasionally looking in on him. I brought him a big plastic bag when he gutted them. Then we shook hands, I thanked him for taking the roosters off our hands at least as vigorously, I hope, as he thanked me for giving them to him--and back James went to the city. I gave the bag of guts to June. She will today feed them to the chickens who will fall upon their former lovers with a frenzy that even humans cannot match for rapaciousness. In an hour or less, the three crowing roosters will have been recycled into clucking hens happily sitting on their nests laying eggs. And so the world goes round and round. September 18, 2011 I walked outside to the shop, got the little chainsaw from the shelf in the back, and walked behind the building to where I was going to cut. June came along on the tractor pulling the wagon. I stopped by a fallen mulberry log on the way. I pulled on the cord a couple of times but the saw didn’t start. Chain saws, damn them. Then I remembered that I hadn’t primed it by pushing on the little soft plastic bubble on the side. Which I then did. Four times, maybe five. Then I pulled the cord again and it started right up. I cut the mulberry log into manageable pieces and then walked around to the other side of the grain bin to the fence where there was a dead white elm tree maybe twenty-five feet high.
be good stuff for this season. It wouldn’t be. But I went ahead and cut it down. It fell easily. I walked a few paces south to another tree I’d already felled and started cutting up the limbs into four foot sections. Out of the corner of my eye I saw June roll up. I nodded to the pile and she got off and began loading the logs into the cart. Suddenly the chain dropped off the bar. I shut down the saw. Dammit, dammit. Story of my life. On the other hand, I went on thinking, I was grateful, now--only now--for the chain saw’s invention. I used to tell people when I came here I’d never heard of a chain saw, that I thought it was something for cutting chains, and when someone told me I ought to get one back in 1972 I said, Why? I don’t want to cut any chains. My little joke. I put down the saw and helped June load the rest of the logs until the wagon was full. Then while she drove back to the yard gate I carried the saw to the shop, chain hanging down, and laid it on the bench to be fixed later. I should do it right now. I walked into the house with June, exhausted and happy. September 17, 2011 I went out in the dark morning and got an armload of firewood. I brought it inside and clunked it down beside the stove. When I opened the stove door I saw that it already had a load in it, paper and tinder and kindling and even a log or two that I had put there at the end of the season late last spring. So I struck a big kitchen match, lit the paper at the bottom and opened the draft. The flame grew quickly, the flue rumbled and in a few minutes I had a crackling and warming fire. I watched it through the glass door.
of cutting firewood, bringing it to the house, carrying out ashes, shoveling snow and getting stuck in it and shivering and putting on clothes, clothes, clothes. I was born without clothing and had I not been born in North Dakota in January, I would have preferred to go without clothing forever. When I’m feeling like this I repeat to myself one of my favorite dismal quotations, a line from (I think) the poet (can’t think of her name just now, one of those 20th Century ladies with three names), “Life goes on. I forget just why.” But having just read a critique of the Book of Job I don’t want to feel that way for very long. Life is what it is, and winter is part of it. I’m grateful to be alive. September 16, 2011 Who remembers the old song, "The Best Things In Life Are Free?" Nowadays the best things in life are only $9.99 if you order by midnight, plus $18 for shipping and handling.
inclined do? My father used to ask, irritably, of my mother, Do you think I'm made of money? And then he'd grin and laugh, showing that he didn't really mean it, but in a way, he did. He genuinely felt that his job was to keep the wolf from the door, and of course he did, but it's sad that that was how he measured himself. Money should not be the measure of a man or a woman, but it often is, or maybe always is for all of us some of the time. Just an observation...that's all I've got this morning. I have no answers. It's Friday, that's my answer. I think the refrain in that old song was that "the moon belongs to everyone/the best things in life are free." So tonight I'll be looking at the moon. September 15, 2011 The Navy put thirty of us in a room. We were all yeoman strikers. That word, "strikers," was Navy slang meaning something like a person who was "working to become something." We were learning to become yeomen.
meant you were a clerk-typist. Go figure. You quickly learn the Navy has its own language and that the Navy exists in a parallel--and sometimes even perpendicular--universe. So there we were, at the Naval Training Center in Bainbridge, Maryland in the fall of 1955. They gave each of us a typewriter with a blank keyboard and sat us down at a simple wooden desk. Slides were shown on the wall in front of us with the names of the keys shown, and so we had to look up to the screen, not down, and type stuff over and over, hours every day, maddeningly repetitive, j-u-j space, j-u- j space and so on. A Yeoman First Class walked up and down the room observing what we were doing and making sure we did it the Navy way. They were businesslike and firm and neither friendly nor unfriendly, not at all like the movie DIs you see. (Of course this wasn't Boot Camp, it was called Service School.) This routine went on for ten weeks, broken up in an eight hour day with some stuff about being a clerk and filing and other office procedures, and at end of that time each of us could type 30+ words a minute without looking at the keyboard and without making many mistakes. At the end of that time we were declared yeomen and allowed to wear a pair of crossed feathers (quill pens) on our right arm. And that's how we won the war. This morning I note that I have two more poison ivy zits. They aren’t blisters. Maybe some people get blisters like they always mention in the literature but I never have. I get small red bumps that gradually do blister up and turn yellow. They itch like hell. One single bump can drive you nuts. So I put stuff on them and usually don’t suffer very much. Maybe I have fifteen or so now around my ankles and on my thighs and arms.
white goo called Technu, and then wash it off in cool water. I take a shower, actually. The problem is that the woods is full of poison ivy. It’s everywhere. It grows on the ground, of course, but it stands tall like a bush and grows up trees as a vine. It’s in fields, it’s in the forest, it probably can grow on water if not walk on it. The stuff is just ubiquitous. The active evil ingredient is something called urushiol, some kind of oily stuff that gets on the skin even sometimes from just walking past a patch. You can get a hell of a case of it by burning the poison ivy and then playing in the smoke. Don’t do that. I take pills every morning that do various things for me. I have one of those weekly pill taking plastic thingies, you know, little plastic compartments each labeled SMTWTFS, and I keep it in a cabinet just by the bathroom, and every morning I lift the S or T or whatever and take that day's pills. It's what old people or those who have any chronic conditions do. It's particularly useful to old people because they can look to see if they've taken their pills for the morning. It's easy to forget. I'm not really terribly forgetful yet, but I'm sure I'm more forgetful than when I was 40 ro 50. Well, I am forgetful, but I've learned to write things down or I use a little reminder (like the pill box) to tell me. Occasionally I "forget" my hearing aids only to discover they are in my ears or I forget my glasses that are on my face.
which is in the ascendant--going north, if you will. Even before I joined a spiritual program I understood that if I was going to have a happy life I'd better learn to deal with the growing decrepitude, somehow. For a lot of my friends it's just resignation, a quiet and friendly attitude toward the inevitable. Most take refuge (if that is what it is to be called) in family and a supportive circle of friends. Some find religion a tonic and way of life. LifeStory has helped me a lot. I was just sort of slipsliding along, story of my life, when I got into this business in 1976. We were broke (because heedless of much of anything I'd quit my tenure-track job in Wisconsin, one of the best paying university systems in the country), of course, and so I saw an ad in the paper for someone to tutor in the local GED (High school equivalency) program. I applied and was hired immediately at something like $6 an hour. But teaching in the GED program was boring: mostly I just sat there waiting for someone to ask a question. So in my leisure time I wrote up a proposal to teach old folks, I'd go downtown to the tall building where the old folks lived and get a class together and I'd get them to write their autobiographies. Because I was lucky enough to have a bright and innovative supervisor, Elizabeth Verschelden, the program was funded as the "Harvest of Age" Program and we did it hot and heavy for a couple of years. Then it died for lack of funding and I went back to farming and drifted into contracting to make a living. I didn't start LifeStory the newsletter/magazine until 1991, but it has stuck, more or less. And of course like any really good job it has helped me more than anyone. September 12, 2011 Maybe I didn’t get a good night’s sleep, but I did sleep, some, and it’s a beautiful moony morning, just magical outside. I walked out on the northeast deck with not much on into the cool silvery morning and the full moon. "Lady moon, Lady moon, where are you going?" we used to croon when I was a boy. June was asking the other night when we were driving home in a full moon about the man in the moon and why it was a man. Her father told her it was the Man in the Moon. He always looked to me like Arturo Toscanni (don't ask me why) but when, now, driving along, we looked closer probably it could be a woman in the moon. I should tell her about Lady Moon. She may remember that too. But why not just Moon? Years ago we went to Yosemite National Park and saw, among other natural wonders, "Bridal Veil Falls." Why do we have to personify everything: “Bridal Veil Falls,” indeed! You'd think we were the center of the universe. It's good to be here, just another cricket singing in the crazy blue night. I was in a hurry, true. June was with me, and we were running late--or so I felt. So the guy in the pickup in front of me, stopped at the light but the light was green, frustrated me. I pulled up behind him. I didn’t honk,though I said something aloud in the car, something like Come on, Elmer, let’s go! Slowly the guy pulled onto the freeway and I roared past him. I gave him a look. No finger, no signs, just a contemptuous look. He was a fat fellow with a beard, and had a passenger. That’s all I saw. September 10, 2011
even though he was, once again, stopping in the lane, blocking the traffic behind him. He was waving his hand at me. I figured maybe he was angry, and was going to ignore him, but then I thought maybe he was someone I knew, or maybe something was wrong with the back end of my car. So I asked June to roll her window down. “You in a hurry to get around me?” he yelled. He didn’t look like anybody I knew. Did he? His meaty face was red, and he waved his hands as he yelled at me. “Not now,” I yelled back, grinning. And then, I don’t know why, I said, “You should pull up to the line.” I meant the line where the cars were stopped at a red light, a car length or two ahead of me. I don’t know what he said next. Something like, “Yeah, I bet!” or “So I noticed!” “How are you doing?” I said. I could see the passenger, probably the man’s wife, was smiling lamely. I think she was embarrassed. “I’m doing just fine,” he said. Then luckily the light changed because I had run out of conversation. So I pulled ahead. In the rear view mirror I could see the him still standing there, cars lined up behind him. “Maybe he’s been drinking,” I said to June. “Maybe he’s drunk.” But maybe I was a little drunk too, so to speak, when I had practically sat on his tail back there at the first light. More than a little sheepishly, I drove on to our meeting. September 9, 2011 Now and then I think I have all the answers. Luckily, this attitude is diminishing as I get older. That growing attitude is helped occasionally reviewing the evidence of my know-it-all past. So in that spirit here's something I wrote in my Journal shortly after 9/11 in 2001. How can we fight terrorism? Seriously, what can an individual do, at home, in her spare time? Well, consider what the urge to commit terrorist acts comes from. People don't just decide in school they'd like to be terrorists the way they might decide to be engineers or doctors. No, terrorism is born out of a deep, deep sense of frustration. The frustration may be, probably is, a result of the individual's own ineptitude, personal fears, or other character deficiencies. But that really doesn't matter. The point is that they feel so frustrated and alienated that they want to destroy others, and perhaps themselves too. We can't come in and wave a magic wand and make all that go away. But we can listen, we can give them an ear that, if not sympathetic, at least is there. We can listen, and respond in some way, perhaps, that moves the whole situation forward. Probably in our everyday life we don't come in contact with Osama bin Laden or his likes. He's not a hometown kid. But he is, was, a product of some hometown, some culture. (Remember that he phoned his stepmom and told her he was going to be out of touch for a while, proving that even monsters have mothers they keep in touch with.) We come in touch, daily, though, with folks who share some of his qualities in degree and perhaps also in kind. I know this doesn't sound very romantic. Maybe you wanted to reenlist and go spelunking in Afghanistan with a flamethrower or an AK47 or at least a vaporizer (laser operated, of course) in hand. But it is realistic. Talk to people. Listen to them. Hear them. It's not a sign of weakness to do that, and not, for sure, an offense to Allah, or God. September 8, 2011
On November 23, 1963, I was at the University of Kansas, on campus and in class at 2 or 3 in the afternoon when the news came. The classroom was an old World War II barracks that had been converted to provide small seminar rooms for the Western Civ program. A graduate student in history, a young man named Eric, was leading the class. I think we were discussing the Italian Renaissance when there was some noise down at the end of the hall. A radio had been turned up. We looked at one another, hearing something about the President and Dallas. There was hubbub. Eric stood up. We six or eight of us all stood up and walking out into hall and toward the radio in the office at the end of the hall. I don’t know, don’t remember, exactly what happened next. We drifted our separate ways. I went outside and toward the Memorial Union, where I always went after this class. As I walked inside the doors of the Union, Harry Reasoner, newsman, on the big TV in the main concourse, people around, everyone watching, said in a solemn voice, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, has died. We stood around, we strangers who would remember this moment forever. “Whaaa-tt?” “The President?” “How?” “What has happened?” Then it came out that there had been a shooting from the windows of a building above the parade route, Kennedy died in the hospital, Jackie was covered with his blood but unhurt herself, Governor Connally was critically wounded…the police were searching a theater. And so history was made to stand still on that fateful day.
s--the plumbing supply shop--I got a lot of advice but no help, not even much interest in selling me supplies. They discussed the source of water, or lack of it, at length--my reiterated idea of going ahead with the house plumbing at the same time as getting water to the house didn’t catch on. They shook their heads & turned away to their cups of coffee, to their other customers. “Maybe I should speak to Al. He’d be back tomorrow.” Okay. I left. I’d see Al tomorrow. First thing in the morning. Sure. Then in trying to install the window glass I encountered two difficulties: (1) window weights suspended on sash cord nailed to the window frame, 2) old putty so hard a knife wouldn’t remove it. Neither difficulty seems insurmountable, but damned typical of the kind of slowdown problems I’m running into. The weights I can unfasten after the glass is in; the putty can be heated and removed. But each operation takes more time, and can open on to more difficulties. In order to heat the putty I needed a propane bottle--luckily I brought the torch attachment itself; the heat could damage the frame; re-fastening the window weights I’ll have to be careful not to jar the glass & break it. So...I am coming up on forty years here at Letter Rock. I used to tell friends that if I had it to do over the first time I set eyes on this place, Nov. 19, 1971, I should have flipped a cigaret butt into it and watched it burn the house to the ground, leaving only the stone foundation. I could have rebuilt it from the foundation up. Probably that would have been a good idea--at least the concept of building new would have been--but that's not what I did. What was I thinking? Or rather--What, was I thinking? Here I am today. And just grateful and glad to have a pleasant and comfortable place to live. September 6, 2011 Why am I here? This is the question I ask myself when I go downstairs to get something. Probably I just went for more coffee, or maybe it's to take my morning meds, or something else so very simple. But I can't remember. I stand at the counter in the kitchen and say out loud, Why am I here? Of course the questions reverberates. Why am I here? I mean really? Maybe there's a reason I can't remember whether I came after coffee or where I put the cup of it once I get it... but I can remember in full detail (now that I put my mind to it) what my father said to me when I went off to join the Navy, the clarity of the blue sky that morning, his blue eyes, even the robin's egg blue of the car we drove down to the railroad station in, and later on the train chugging along through the valley on the way to Kansas City, windows open--imagine that!! That's why we're here. Our children are waiting to hear.
I'm not one who goes around talking overmuch about the good old days and how nowadays nothing can compare. I've known plenty of people whose lives today are sapped by their poignant and vivid memories of how great life used to be.
remember them because it reminds me of the rigors of life today. One is of dogs. In the good old days (1950s, early 60s) dogs often ran loose on a campus. Presumably they were someone's pet dog and lived near the campus but during classes they just ran with the students and loved the attention. They were always mutts of some sort or other. People didn't have dogs of special breeds then, dogs were just dogs. Some would even attend class. I swear I took one philosophy class in Bascom Hall at the University of Wisconsin where a yellow dog (perhaps that yellow dog of the famous philosophical question, When is a yellow dog most apt to enter a room?) with a big wide and happy wagging tail would follow the professor in and flop down on the boards of the dais as the professor mounted it and took his chair at the desk there. He'd sleep all through the lecture and wake at the bell and leave with the students. Can you imagine that happening on any campus today? September 4, 2011 I just had a fifteen minute session in the bathroom in which I read an account of the life of a department store magnate named Fred Lazarus, Jr., the life of the poet, Emma Lazarus, who wrote the famous poem, "The New Colossus," the closing lines of which are quoted on the base of the Statue of Liberty and who lived only 38 years--“Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Moving right along through Volume 7, I read about the inventor and aircraft manufacturer, William P (owell) Lear, born like Mark Twain in Hannibal, Mo., (but nearly a hundred years later) who built his Lear Jets in Wichita, Kansas. If the session wasn’t productive of what I had wanted to produce, I did receive an intellectual abundance from my beloved set of Encyclopedia Britannica that I bought for five dollars at the Salvation Army Thrift Store in Topeka something like ten years ago. And for that I am very grateful. September 3, 2001 I have no idea what I’m going to write, but I do know I’m not going to write about not writing or about writing. I’ve done enough of that. So. The mail was on the kitchen counter wrapped in a newspaper, The Wamego Smoke Signal, that we’ve been getting in the mail every day for, I swear, thirty years: and we have always immediately tossed it into the recycling pile. Occasionally I glance at the banner headline: Audrey Hickenlooper Named 4-H Champ, along with a big photograph of Audrey with her winning entry, a pumpkin or a cow, with her toothy grin and country good looks. I was wrong about that. I’ve done everything in my life upside down and backwards. Was it better to read a headline that said Nixon To Tour China? What did I know or care of Nixon, really? At least the reigning 4-H champ was a human member of my community. There was a bill from Farm Bureau Insurance, a solicitation from Capital One, and a postcard from our car dealer, Time for a Change! I dropped everything in the recycle pile. I drew a cup of cold coffee from the maker, walked across the kitchen and put it in the microwave, set it on 45, and pushed start. Immediately it began to whir and hum and through the glass I could see the cup--the very cup my mother had used for many years before she died--going round and round on the glass thingie. Carousel.
The saw was, for once, sharp. And it started, mirabile dictu, or whatever it is they say! I went behind the shop and cut a fallen mulberry branch into four foot lengths. Then I did the same to a fallen white elm nearby.
shade. I fired up the saw again--first pull!--and went quickly to work on several standing white oaks that had grown up in clumps instead of good honest one trunk trees. I felled three or four of them and working like a young man of 40, I cut those into four foot lengths. This all took me only about twenty minutes, but I was tired out by then. Don't overdo it. I turned off the saw, pitched it in the wagon and drove toward home. I'd pick up those logs another day. Take it easy, old timer. The point is to get some physical work done and to cut some firewood, it's not to prove that I'm not 73. Because I am. "I am what I am," said Popeye the Sailorman. September 1, 2011 I got out of bed, I went to the bathroom, I made the coffee, I turned on the television, I drank a cup of fresh coffee and I watched the morning news. As I watched out of the corner of my eye I read an article in an old newspaper. I drew another cup of coffee from the maker and I came up here and began to write. It felt good. The sound of the clickety-clack of the keys felt good, the appearance of words on the screen felt good, the hum of my mind felt good. I went to the window and raised the blind. Dark still. It’s going to be a hot one! This is my life. I lived in this time, in this place, I did these things. I could have written this about yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that. My life resembles a paragraph in a New Wave novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet. But now, of course, the New Wave isn’t new anymore. It isn’t even there. Most of my future is behind me. So why am I here, still, still tickling the ivories as we used to say? I exist in order to archive my little life, to love all the world and to have for breakfast one egg, preferably poached, on top of a piece of whole wheat toast, a half a glass of skimmed milk, and yet another cup of French roast coffee. “Life goes on,” a cynical poet once wrote, “I forget just why.” For years I forgot too. But now I think I am remembering, I am awakened, and I know why life goes on. I am blessed with six children, four grandchildren, and seven billion close friends. That’s why life goes on. I am here to smooth the way for them, just as others, my mother, my father, all the others back to those guys who built the pyramids and beyond, the oozy guys and gals who came out of the originating slime--just as they did for me. ### -- The significance of saying thank you.
Menninger Clinic. I knew she lived and worked in Michigan because I’d googled her more than a year ago to get her address so I could write a thank you note to her for what she did for me--saved my life, really--back in 1962, when I went to Menninger’s with the worst case of writer’s block imaginable and the worst time in my life. I thought about her and sometimes talked about her to friends, and I always referred to her as "the beautiful Argentian babe." Well, and she was a beautiful lady, and of course I, like nearly all her patients, fell in love with her. She was also a great doctor, a great psychiatrist who had graduated with her MD at the University of Buenos Aires and interned at a famous hospital in Paris before coming to Menninger as a resident and then as faculty in the Menninger School of Psychiatry. She was a beautiful young woman then of 30 or so, so exotic looking in her sunglasses and light brown skin and gaudy jewelry that I nicknamed her Dragon Lady after the character in Terry and the Pirates. Other patients picked up the reference (though she herself had never heard of the old radio show, of course) and for a time if you said your house doctor was Dragon Lady, everybody knew who you were talking about. The fact that she was beautiful and brilliant but, nevertheless, deigned to see me every day (the lowest point of my life, the lowest my congenitally and chronically low self-esteem ever was), that very fact in itself was healing to some considerable degree. I googled and to my surprise and shock, up came her obituary! She had died last year. She was an important person in my life, she saved my life. But now Teresa Bernardez, 79, was dead. She had practiced psychiatry right up to the end in East Lansing, Michigan. I read the obituary and learned things about her I had never known: she has one surviving son, she had divorced her artist husband some years ago. People die. People you love and who were important in your life die. I accept that. But my great regret is that I had written a letter to her two months before she died to thank her. Thinking it too soupy and emotional (I cried all the way through the writing of the letter) I put it by, it sat there as an icon on my desktop for more than a year. Then she died. I never sent it. I do regret that. I guess she probably had cancer because the last picture of her showed her wearing a cap, beautiful as she still was at that age. Perhaps my letter might have been one tiny drop of satisfaction in the last days of her life. They say when the end comes you will regret not the things you did but the things you did not do. Oh, so true! August 30, 2011 It was midnight or a little after, pitch dark. I was wide awake, so why not? I walked out to the shop and turned on the light. The garden was still dark, no help there. I figured. I brought out the large floodlight, took it to the garden and put it on an upturned five gallon bucket. I plugged it in.
smooth. I felt a little stupid but I felt pretty good too. The seeds. I went back to the shop and got a packet of Swiss chard, a packet of spinach, and a packet of cherry belle radishes. What better thing to do when you can’t sleep? I turned the rake on edge and made a small narrow ditch down the center of the row. If someone drove down the road now I might be thought insane. I was insane. But I was going to get a fall garden in. Using my thumb and forefinger I dropped the seeds in a few at a time. I’d better water a little. From the hydrant I got the watering can and sprinkled the little furrow, tamped it all down with my feet, and then gently raked a half inch or so of soil over the seeds. I put everything away and turned out the lights. I was insane, yes, happily insane. When I went back to the house and came into the bedroom and dropped my clothes on the chair beside the bed June rolled over. “Where have you been?” “Gardening,” I said. “You’re crazy,” she said, and went back to sleep. Random Narrative Journaling.
reveals me and my world--which after all is the goal of writing personal history, isn't it?
the ground. The muscle in my groin. I started checking it for leaks by running it through my hands a few feet at a time. It was dirty and wet and cold in my hands. June had other stuff to do. Better me than her. But the muscle stung with each movement. When I got to the very end of the hose I saw the coupling at the end was broken. Oookay. I dragged it over to the shop to fix it later. Then I unscrewed two sections of the hose leading to the garden and coiled them, the cats uncharacteristically very interested in what I was doing. A long snake, is that what you cats who think you’re so smart believe? Nanja, the yellow one, pounced on the moving end of the hose. “You goof,” I said. I lifted the coils one section at a time and carried them to the back of June’s van and lifted the door. Of course it will be stuffed with tools. I hoisted first one coil and then the other onto the piled tool buckets and short ladders. & |